Month: February 2010

This article in the Arizona Republic quotes heavily from NRA Board member Todd Rathner, who speaks about a number of proposed bills to liberalize Arizona’s weapons laws. They are reportedly even seeking legalizing concealed carry bill without a requirement to first obtain a permit or license, which has some D.C. based people in hysterics:

Two bills, one to allow concealed weapons without a permit and the other to exempt guns made and kept in the state from federal regulation, each has more than a dozen legislators backing them. If passed, Arizona would be only the third state in the nation to allow either of the looser restrictions.

Everitt called the proposal to no longer require a concealed-carry permit “crazy.”

“You would have dangerous individuals and criminals carrying weapons in public,” he said.

And presumably Everitt thinks they already aren’t? I don’t know enough about Arizona politics to know whether this has any chance of passing, but if it did, Arizona is a state with a major city. Alaska and Vermont are interesting, in that they don’t require a license to carry firearms concealed or unconcealed, but it’s easy for opponents to dismiss this with “It’ll never work for our state. We’re too urban, too populated. Alaska and Vermont are very rural states that don’t have the same problems we do.”

All it really takes is one state with big cities and sprawling suburbs to pass this, and when the sky doesn’t fall, we can probably start passing it in other states. In the late 80s it was Florida that started the shall-issue licensing trend, and it started a tidal wave that spread across the country. In most states, the votes just aren’t going to be there to pass something like this, but they weren’t with concealed carry either, until suddenly we got the votes in Florida, and the rest is history. I have my doubts that the Arizona Legislature has the votes to pass this, but it they did, it might be the push needed to start the dominoes falling.

According to Roll Call, which is unfortunately behind a subscriber wall:

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has quietly been preparing a series of gun rights amendments that he intends to offer to must-pass Senate bills this year, hoping to force Democrats to take tough votes and draw clear distinctions between the two parties heading into the midterms.

I managed to get a copy from someone who had a subscription, and I won’t repost what is not publicly readable, but the gist is that it’s part of the GOP 2010 strategy, and that would appear to be to show the Democrats that they are the party of gun rights, by one upping them. I have to admit to liking having both parties fighting over us like we’re some hot date at the prom.

Coburn says one of the Amendments will deal with restoring gun rights to veterans who were declared mentally incompetent, because they weren’t able to handle things like their own finances, but who are recovered currently. Under the Clinton Administration, all these folks were stuffed into NICS as prohibited purchasers, even though current guidelines would not allow this (H.R. 2640, passed under some GOA generated controversy a few years ago, restricted this practice). Also back on the table is the concealed carry reciprocity bill, and ATF reform. Sounds pretty good to me. I look forward to watching the anti-gun minority in Congress have a cow when this stuff hits the floor.

Fait of the World, a new blog to me, has this to say about the Brady folks:

The Brady Bunch are starting to see the writing on the wall and they have grown desperate.  The evidence over the last 10 years have proven their every argument wrong.  Gun control hasn’t worked.  Gun rights have.  States that have the least restrictions tend to also have the least amount of crime.  England banned handguns in 1997.  In 4 years, their gun crime doubled and their overall violent crime went up 118%.  The prophesy, of murder in the streets, given when conceal carry started to be debated in the first states to take it up… never happened.

People are starting to realize the emperor has no clothes, and with the courts hopefully about to take prohibition off the table, I think the gun control movement will find fewer people interested in donating money so we can nickel and dime gun owners with meaningless and useless restrictions. Their folks were about prohibition — making a statement about the kind of country they wanted to live in, and the kind of society they wanted us to be. The sun is rapidly setting on that possibility.

The Philadelphia Daily News has really outdone themselves this time. We’ve seen the abuse of the term “loophole” to describe perfectly lawful activity the anti-gun groups and anti-gun media want to portray as sneaky, and something that obviously ought to be illegal, but this article really takes the cake.

“They could be disapproved here and they could apply in Florida and we are not notified,” said Philadelphia Police Lt. Lisa King, commander of the Gun Permit Unit. “So if we are not giving them a permit to carry, how is Florida allowed to override our decision?”

District Attorney Seth Williams said that the loophole defeats local efforts to keep streets safe.

“We should not allow Florida to pierce the veil of sovereignty of Pennsylvania,” he said. “This is something I’m going to direct my legislation unit to look into. This is a loophole I think it would be best to close.”

It’s not doing anything about Pennsylvania sovereignty. Pennsylvania has a law that recognizes licenses to carry from other states, and that law makes no distinction between residents and non-residents. If you possess a license from that state, you’re good. What the Inquirer also does not mention is that the requirements for a Florida license are more stringent than Pennsylvania’s, a reason that it’s more widely recognized by other states.

Locally, though, it’s become known as the “Florida loophole” because that’s where most of the out-of-state permits are coming from, according to police and prosecutors.

Locally I’ve never heard that term before. You mean locally around the newsroom? Around CeaseFire PA headquarters?

But CeaseFire PA executive director Joe Grace called the loophole “outrageous” and said that the issue is one his group will push in the upcoming governor’s race, in which Attorney General Tom Corbett is a candidate.

Grace said that the reciprocity law is not unusual, but blamed the loophole on Corbett’s translation of the law.

There’s no mistranslation. Corbett has an affirmative duty under Pennsylvania law to seek out reciprocity with states that are willing. Grace may want to smear Corbett in an election year, but Corbett is only exercising his duty under the law with these agreements. The law makes no provision to denying licensing to non-residents.

“People engaged in criminal activity are smart enough that once they are denied here, they are aware of this law and apply in Florida,” he said. “That’s thwarting the ability of Philadelphia police or any department to police Pennsylvania law.”

If gang members in Philadelphia are paying 123 dollars to the Florida Department of Agriculture, going through the training requirements, getting fingerprinted, and submitting to an FBI background check, I’ll eat my hat. They can point to one guy who ended up charged with a crime. One guy.

Grace cited an example of a Philadelphia man who obtained a Florida license to carry. He was subsequently pulled over in a traffic stop, and not only did he have two handguns on him, but he also had a half-pound of marijuana, numerous other drugs and several thousand dollars in cash.

When the case went to court, prosecutors could not charge the man with any gun violations, Grace said, because of his Florida permit.

Funny thing is, I was aware of this case, and was very, very curious as to its outcome, because there had been no precedent in the courts as to whether a Florida license would actually be recognized in the case where a person was not in possession of a PA LTC but was a resident of PA. The law said it should be, but that doesn’t mean a judge will see the law the same way.

“They mention that they’ve been denied a permit in Philadelphia for everything from parking tickets to child-support payments,” he said. “You may not have a criminal record but you owe some tickets or child support and they deny you when the rest of the state doesn’t.

“That’s not to say I’m for the deadbeat dad, but if you’re behind in your bills are you not allowed to protect yourself?”

Christie Caywood, a member of the Pennsylvania Firearms Owners Association, who spoke on the organization’s behalf, said that Philadelphia’s practice of revoking licenses of victims whose guns have been stolen, and the department’s high permit-revocation rate – 505 last year – send residents to other states.

“It is not surprising that some gun owners may opt for more uniform standards of another state license over the discriminatory abuses of the Philadelphia Police Department,” she said.

I don’t know who this Christie Caywood person is, but she’s a great spokeswoman for PAFOA. It’s the discriminatory abuses in Philadelphia that drive people to get Florida Licenses. I’m very happy that the city wants to push this issue, because we should have this conversation.

Interesting article from Real Clear Politics, about how passing Obamacare won’t save Democrats, but it does have this tidbit:

There were two controversial pieces of legislation that defined the Clinton Administration for Republican-leaning voters: the assault weapons ban and the first Clinton budget (a.k.a. the tax hike). If we look at the fifteen Democrats who voted against both pieces of legislation, only one lost (she represented a district that gave Bush a 15-point win in 1992). In fact, about half of them saw their share of the vote increase or stay roughly the same from 1992!

Let’s move on to Democratic incumbents who represented Republican-leaning districts who voted for only one of these two pieces of legislation. There were thirty-seven such Democrats. The casualty rate here is a little higher; thirteen of them, or thirty-five percent of them, lost. And of the twenty-two Democrats from Republican-leaning districts who voted for both pieces of controversial legislation, ten of them (45%) lost.

In other words, the problem for Democrats in 1994 was not that they didn’t support Clinton’s agenda enough. It was that they got too far out in front of their conservative-leaning districts and supported the President too much.

We can use a more quantitative approach. I constructed a simple regression model to try to measure what factors played a role in Democrats’ downfall in 1994. If you want the nitty gritty of the model, you can click this footnote ^[2]. But the bottom line is that, holding all other things equal, a Democrat in a Republican district who voted for the assault weapons ban lost 4.2 percentage points off of his 1992 numbers. If the same Democrat voted for the Clinton budget, she lost 3.7 points. In other words, these two votes alone could take a Democrat who won a comfortable election with 56 percent of the vote in 1992, and turn her into a loser in 1994.

No doubt our opponents will argue this is just another flak perpetuating the myth that the NRA has any political power, and there’s nothing to lose by voting for gun control. We’re hearing that swan song once again, with the Luntz poll pushed by Mayors Against Illegal Guns. It would behoove politicians to remember that public polling in the mid 90s showed the same numbers that their agenda shows today. People had no idea what an assault weapon was. When they found out, they were pissed.